have one therapist who seemed to believe
in her. She was grateful, too, for a pas-
tor who arrived one day, teaching the
Gospel, and gave her a Bible. "From that
point forward," she recalls, "I had hope."
For some youths convicted of sex
o enses, treatment is a chance to es-
cape a turbulent home life, or to re-
route a warped trajectory. "But this
idea that a ten-year-old kid who does
something sexually inappropriate needs
residential treatment is completely in-
sane," Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau, the
director of the Moore Center for the
Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, at
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health, told me. In the early
two-thousands, when Letourneau first
began to research juveniles who sex-
ually o end, she discovered that there
was little rigorous scholarship about
e ective treatment. "These o enses
do cause harm, and we can never lose
sight of that," she said. "But I believe
we can do a much, much better job of
targeting the kids who commit these
behaviors, and preventing them."Writ-
ing in the journal Ethics & Behavior,
in , she and another psychology
professor, Charles Borduin, lamented
"the research community's failure---
our failure---to subject the most widely
used models of treatment to empiri-
cal investigation."
Letourneau and her colleagues set
about to address this. Their findings
have been significant. Despite what
Amie Zyla told Congress in , re-
searchers had already observed that most
youths who are charged with a sex
o ense---upward of ninety-five per cent,
Letourneau told me---don't reo end
sexually. The motives behind their
crimes, too, are di erent from those of
most adults who sexually o end. In many
cases of early adolescents who sexually
touch younger kids in their families, the
best treatment may not be "sex o ender"
treatment at all; some children have
never been taught that such touching
is unacceptable, and providing training
in sexual boundaries will su ce. For
kids with more serious sexual-behavior
problems, a family-based model known
as "multi-systemic therapy" has proved
its worth, combining individualized
treatment of a child with programming
that involves the child's parents or care-
takers. "We now have an e ective treat-
ment," Letourneau said, referring to this
more holistic approach, "but it's just not
available to ninety-nine per cent of kids."
What is available, too often, is a form
of commercial treatment that can be
abusive in its own right. In my inter-
views with registrants and their fami-
lies, one question came up repeatedly:
"Have you looked into the therapy in-
dustry?" Many treatment programs have
dedicated, well-trained sta members
who engage with families and seem to
help children thrive. But some provid-
ers lack the resources that would allow
them to separate o enders of various
risk levels. And, in some parts of the
country, I found a cottage industry of
court-authorized but poorly regulated
therapy providers subjecting kids and
teens to widely debunked interventions
or controversial invasive technologies.
Juveniles undergoing treatment for sex
o enses have been exposed to severe
verbal abuse, beatings, and even sexual
predation at residential facilities. Not
a few people have been placed in du-
bious but costly treatment programs
for actions that many believe should
never have been criminalized in the
first place.These experiences are hardly
exclusive to juveniles; they extend to
many youths over eighteen, whose jour-
neys through the justice system can be
equally alarming. The most surprising
instances are known as the "Romeo
and Juliet" cases, involving consensual
sex between teens.
I , not long after his
senior year of high school, Anthony
Metts got a summer job at the lakeside
camp where he'd once been a camper.
Metts, who grew up in Midland,Texas,
was adopted; at school, where he was
"I've decided to leave public o ce because I lost the election."